The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (31 page)

A man in a white cap, selling bus tickets, said the insurgents also posed a cosmetic problem for frequent travellers between Kabul and the Iranian border: in Iran, men usually shave their beards or cut them short, but travelling there meant crossing Taliban territory, where too little beard could arouse suspicion. It was easy enough to get shaved before entering Iran, he said, but the beardless return journey could be hazardous. This threat hurt his business at a small ticket kiosk on the roadside, because anybody who could
afford a plane ticket now avoided his busses. All the same, he sympathized with the insurgents: “The Taliban are not the problem,” he said. “When people saw the bad behaviour of the foreigners and government, the Taliban stood up to protect them.” A forty-year-old bus driver agreed, saying the police robbed him more frequently than bandits or insurgents. Another driver suggested that the cops in fact colluded with the robbers, ignoring them for a cut of the proceeds. He had fourteen years of experience driving busses on Afghan highways, and claimed he had never seen a worse situation on the roads than at the present. At a bustling ticket agency inside the city, a veteran salesman excused himself from the throng of passengers and sat with me inside a sweltering car, preferring the windows rolled up so nobody would overhear him talking with a foreigner. The core of the problem, he said, is that no single force controls the countryside. “During the Taliban government there was only one system, but now there are many opposing forces, so it’s very dangerous.”

For all of those interviews around the edges of the city, we drove a beat-up sedan and I disguised myself with the outfit I had previously reserved for dangerous parts of the south: loose pants, long shirt, sparkly cap. We did not tell anybody where we were going, and did not linger. None of the notes from those conversations run more than a few pages because there always came a moment when my translator would give me a look that meant we should leave. If I didn’t catch his glance, he would become more forceful: “Mr. Graeme, please, let’s go.” He did not need to explain, and never had to ask twice. All journalists in the country understood that walking the streets involved risks, and the places we could wander were becoming fewer and fewer. Still, it felt wonderful to spend days outside, talking with ordinary people, and return to a comfortable guesthouse bed at night. I felt sorry for my colleagues back at Kandahar Air Field, sleeping on cots and unable to walk outside the perimeter. When I returned south in early October, I remember
extolling the virtues of the capital, telling my journalist friends how comparatively easy it was to conduct on-the-ground research—not to mention how relaxing it was, showering off the grime at the end of the day, sitting on a terrace overlooking the hills, sipping a drink. I’ve always felt bad about speaking so enthusiastically about Kabul on those particular days. Within a week, I was proven wrong: my colleague Mellissa Fung, a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), became the latest kidnap victim. She travelled to a part of Kabul many other journalists had already visited, a camp on the outskirts for families running away from the war. That location was marked green on all of the security maps; despite the encroaching violence, nobody considered it a foolish risk. Her travels that day had been safer, in theory, than most of my days in the country. When she disappeared, I exchanged a flurry of messages with a Western security consultant:

Mellissa survived, and later wrote a book about how she was stabbed, raped and held captive for twenty-eight days. She spent most of the ordeal in a hole, a makeshift cell underground, surviving on cookies and juice. Afghan intelligence sprang her free, apparently after sweeping up her captors’ relatives in a wave of arrests and trading them for her freedom. It had been a commercial kidnapping, intended to raise money, much like the business of the Taliban middleman I had hosted in my guesthouse. It was also a reminder that no safe place existed as the war spread northward. What happened in the rest of the country would disturb the peace of the capital, even the wealthy enclaves filled with birdsong and the squeak of tennis shoes. We were beginning to sense that, perhaps, we would not always have Kabul.

Afghan soldier patrols a poppy field

The story that forced me to leave Afghanistan was something I’d been avoiding for years. Journalists often heard rumours about drug corruption, but like many of my colleagues I had been nervous about taking a hard look at the subject. It was radioactive, the most dangerous topic for research, involving serious money and deadly players. Few people were brave enough to speak plainly about the drugs, but their presence could be felt in everything. Drugs powered the south like an electric current, an invisible life-giving energy. The industry explained how enterprise thrived in the arid wastes: trucks full of fat-bottomed sheep trundling into town before festivals; jewellery filling the markets; money-changers sitting on carpets with strongboxes full of crisp currency; ornate walls of palaces climbing ever higher, resembling wedding cakes with their pastel colours. Drugs fuelled the opulence of a residence I visited one afternoon, where I sipped green tea from a gold-handled cup and marvelled at the thousands of tiny mirrors laid out in mosaic patterns on the vaulted arches of ceiling. Outside, beyond the brocade curtains, nomads were busy setting up tarpaulin shelters as their flocks grazed on the scrubby bushes. The herders’ poverty matched the landscape, part of a rhythm thousands of years old, but the wealth of my host belonged to the modern economy. Nearly everything he bought—vehicles,
gasoline, diet supplements, a state-of-the-art exercise treadmill—came from abroad. The money to purchase those things did not result from exports of Kandahar’s grapes and pomegranates. Like so many others, he depended on the narcotics industry.

The drugs were everywhere, but the industry could be inscrutable. One afternoon I witnessed a puzzling scene in the border town of Wesh, a smugglers’ haven on the contested boundary line between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most of the town’s activity concentrated on jostling crowds around the border checkpoint. Traffic clogged the road: cars, trucks, donkey carts, wheelbarrows, and tractors pulling stacks of baggage. The guards took bribes and did not search the packages, as usual, waving men and vehicles through the checkpoint with lazy gestures. So when the security officers perked up and started shouting, I couldn’t immediately see what caused the fuss. Then I spotted him: an unusually dark-skinned man jogging onto Afghan soil with his arms raised above his head, like a marathoner at the finish line. He towered over the guards, wearing a red sweater despite the midday sun. Foreigners were a rare sight at that border crossing, and I was careful to disguise myself as a tribesman, but this guy seemed to enjoy his place at the centre of attention. He loped up to the passport office and roared a wild version of the traditional greeting, wishing peace upon the startled guards—“
Saaaaaalam Aleeeeeikum
!”—and awkwardly tried to give them high-fives. The guards ushered this strange creature into the office and summoned a clerk. The man slapped down a green Nigerian passport, waited a beat, and then opened a thick wallet and pulled out forty dollars. This caused a moment of confusion because the clerk had already found the man’s Afghan visa and was reaching for his stamp when he caught sight of the bribe. “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!” the Nigerian shouted. The clerk shrugged, took the money and stamped. The Nigerian grabbed his passport and ran out of the office, pumping his fists in mad triumph. After a stunned pause, laughter echoed around the bare concrete walls.

I did not expect to understand the Nigerian’s flamboyant entrance to the war; so many things escaped my grasp. Two days later, however, I got an explanation from a government official in Kandahar. I was visiting his office to drop off a book he wanted,
Goblin Market and Other Poems
, by Christina Rossetti—poetry is a popular enthusiasm in Afghanistan, and my friend was especially fond of Rossetti—and our conversation turned to the drug trade. “What do you know about Nigerians?” he asked, picking up a green passport from his desk and slapping it down on a scanner. The machine flashed. “The police brought me this Nigerian,” he continued. “They hadn’t arrested him, but they wanted me to check his documents.” He handed me the passport. “Look at this. What do you see?” It looked like an Afghan visa. The official pointed out flaws: the paper didn’t feel right, and the stamp was intentionally smudged. “You can buy much better forgeries in Pakistan,” he said. “I wonder why he wasn’t caught at the border.” I flipped to the photo, and recognized the man. My acquaintance shook his head with astonishment when I described the scene at the passport counter. The Nigerian claimed that he worked for a trading company, but the company name did not match any listings on the Internet. The local authorities assumed that the Nigerian was a drug dealer (and possibly a drug user) visiting Kandahar with the same lust for adventure and profit that once drew prospectors to the gold rush. Perhaps he heard of the lawlessness and fast money, or maybe he saw photographs of the poppy fields that reached the horizon, churning out more raw opium than the world market could absorb. The Nigerian might have believed that no structure existed in the chaos of the south. He was wrong: he could bribe his way into the country, but he could not walk into Kandahar and buy a share of the drug business. It belonged to a small group of men, and they guarded its secrets jealously.

The drug trade hadn’t always been so well organized, however. Smugglers felt wistful about the early days, when almost any entrepreneur could put together a team of men and call himself an opium
dealer. I met two of those small businessmen in 2005, and heard their stories of freewheeling deals in the years before mafias divided up the market. Both interviews happened in a downtown restaurant in Kandahar city; back then, it wasn’t suicidal for me to linger in public and speak English, and the drug dealers did not seem concerned about associating with a foreigner. We tore into roasted chickens with our fingers, and I took grease-stained notes about the basics of the industry. During the spring harvest, farmers scratched vertical lines in the green bulbs of their poppies, then later collected the gummy paste that oozed from the wounds. Dealers visited the farmers and purchased the paste, often packed into shopping bags. Smugglers collected these bags into shipments big enough to merit the risk and expense of a trip to the border, or to the nearest processing facility. Their routes varied, but the smugglers had essentially two options: overland through the desert, or by highway.

The off-roaders sounded a little crazy. A dealer told me he organized large convoys of Toyota Land Cruisers, moving several tonnes of narcotics at high speed. He preferred routes not controlled by any faction in the war, and carried enough guns to fend off bandits and reduce the need for bribes. They drove to rendezvous points near the Iranian border, or moved the goods into Pakistan’s tribal areas. He could have been describing a scene from a Mad Max movie, and when I eventually saw a smugglers’ camp it did resemble something from an apocalyptic science-fiction film. The makeshift settlement of Girdi Jungle started as a refugee camp in the 1980s, sheltering Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion, but after a generation the camp had become more like a ramshackle city in the borderlands. Perched at the edge of a desert, where the dunes sank into flatlands, it wasn’t immediately clear how the camp sustained itself. But the people weren’t starving by any means; market stalls brimmed with fresh herbs and vegetables, and generous hunks of meat dangled from the butchers’ hooks. The abundance might have seemed mysterious if I hadn’t noticed the sport-utility vehicles roaring out of the
shimmering haze, bearing unknown cargo from Afghanistan to this convenient spot just inside Pakistan. One night, in a nearby town, a fat drug dealer smoked a little hash and pulled a plastic baggie of opium tar from his pocket. He used the drug packet like a pointer, sketching out the shipment routes. I told him that the smugglers might, in theory, want to avoid places under control of any authorities, but they appeared to be crossing territory that fell squarely under Taliban rule. He smiled, and made a gesture with his fingers to indicate money: drug mafias funded the insurgents.